SPORTS JARGON AND THE BUSINESS WORLD
USA TODAY
English may be the international language of business, but foreign executives who are fluent in it find themselves at a loss unless they also master conversational horsehide and the vocabulary of other U.S. sports.
Major League Baseball begins Sunday, but in the global world of business the sun never seems to set on the USA's boys of summer. Executives from Qingdao to São Paulo must know what it means to "make a pitch," and if they don't know what it takes to develop a "home-run" product, they had better know how to "manufacture runs" by "choking up" and "playing small ball in the late innings."
Huh? Business is so rife with the jargon that it makes foreigners wonder what Americans are smoking when they throw around baseball in a business context, like "throwing smoke." "Around the horn" has nothing to do with cargo shipping. "Pickles" don't come from a Vlasic jar. "Chin music" doesn't come from an iPod, and "ringing someone up" has nothing to do with an iPhone. Ethanol doesn't come from a "can of corn."
Paula Shannon, senior vice president at Lionbridge, a Massachusetts-based offshoring services company with 4,000 employees in 25 countries, says even American women knock around phrases such as "stepping up to the plate" like it's a game of "pepper." It's up to foreigners to "steal the signs" or risk moving from the "catbird seat" and into the "peanut gallery." From there, they could attempt a "Hail Mary pass," but now the conversation requires a working knowledge of football — American football.
"The Hail Mary is my favorite expression, which doesn't make sense anywhere that isn't football mad," Shannon says. "You can establish your American centricity and risk a religious offense at the same time."
United Kingdom native Paul Roscoe is president of Sentillion, a technology company near Boston. He has lived in the USA for eight years, long enough to develop a taste for Red Sox and Patriots games, and he understands what others at his company mean when they say "red-zone selling," because in football the stakes get higher when a team gets inside the opponent's 20-yard line. In business the stakes get higher when a sale is about to close.
Arrow Electronics is a Fortune 500 company in Melville, N.Y., that does business in 53 countries. CEO William Mitchell remembers wanting to change the agenda at a global leadership meeting in Fiuggi, Italy. He stood up and announced, "I'm calling an audible." Americans understood. "The Europeans hadn't a clue," Mitchell says.
The list of sports jargon seems endless. Nicola Sanna, the Italian CEO of American software company Netuitive, has a Ph.D. in economics and is fluent in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. But he had to learn the terminology of golf to know that "we're under par" meant the company was exceeding its target, even though it sounds quite the opposite. There is plenty of golf played in Europe, but only Americans seem to speak it in a business context, Sanna says.
'Jump-ball scenario'
Just in time for the Final Four, Alan Guarino, CEO of executive recruiting firm Cornell International, offers a basketball anecdote. He was meeting with executives of an Indian company at the Lanesborough hotel bar in London when one of his colleagues tried to talk the Indians out of a clause in a contract by insisting on a "jump-ball scenario" where neither side would stand to gain an unfair advantage.
"We talked about this for 10 minutes, when one of the executives from India says, 'I'm not quite clear what you mean by the jumping ball,' " Guarino says.
Similarly, Aflac CEO Dan Amos says he was speaking with his marketing director in Japan about using the Aflac duck in Japanese advertising. Amos said the duck would be a "slam-dunk," but then realized that basketball players sometimes miss dunks, so he explained that it meant "great idea."
The Japanese are said to be at a particular loss because they don't use sports analogies in their own language. So pervasive is the use of U.S. sports in a business context that Australian Barry Thomas, an executive at Cook Medical, the American maker of health care devices, assumes that "the whole nine yards" is about football, though he wonders why it isn't the whole 10 yards. An Internet search indicates that the origin of the saying probably has nothing to do with football, but the theories of where it does come from range from the contents of a concrete truck to the amount of material in a kilt to the length of a machine-gun ammo belt.
DaimlerChrysler appears destined to break up nine years after their merger. No one is suggesting baseball has anything to do with it. But when those from Stuttgart mix with the Tiger fans of Detroit, a baseball influence is not out of the question.
Dieter Zetsche, CEO of DaimlerChrysler, is a German born in Istanbul who is fluent in English. When he came to USA TODAY in 2004 for a wide-ranging interview, a reporter warned Zetsche that he was about to get a question "from left field." Zetsche paused, then responded in his dry, Henry Kissinger accent: "That's OK, as long as you don't throw me a curve ball."
If you really want to confuse, toss Yogi-isms — amusing quotes from former New York Yankee Yogi Berra — into the mix. Yogi-isms are legend in U.S. business circles but will make a foreigner's head spin, says David Wright, CEO of Verari Systems, a 6-foot-5, 238-pound former NFL player, who took a job in England with Amdahl from 1991-94. Examples of Yogi-isms are: "When you get to a fork in the road, take it," and "Ninety percent of the game is half mental."
Pace Micro Technology has offices in the U.K., the USA, Hong Kong, Germany and France. But more than half of company's sales are to U.S. customers, perhaps due in part to its advertising slogan, "Bringing Technology Home," the brainchild of British CEO Neil Gaydon after he had spent five years in the USA. How did Gaydon come up with the slogan, which is a double entendre to the baseball literate? He's not really sure, but were he to say that the idea came from "out of left field," Americans would understand.
However, even baseball fans aren't sure why "out of left field" is a synonym for something off-the-wall. Internet sites suggest that it could be that in many ballparks the left field wall is deeper and more remote than in right field. Or, it could be because there used to be a mental hospital beyond the third-base side at Chicago's old West Side Park. Some suggest that it refers to the left field seats at Yankee Stadium, where fans sat a bit miffed because Babe Ruth played in right.
Whatever the origin, there is no European equivalent, says Michael Lock, the British CEO of the North American operations of Ducati, the Italian motorcycle manufacturer. Nor is there a sports term that helps Europeans understand "manufacturing a run." However, some baseball terms have international synonyms. For example, a "googly" is not a search engine, but a bowl (pitch) in cricket that bounces in front of the batter's feet. Now, American executives might see this as an opportunity for the batter to "take one for the team," but the cricket batter must defend the wicket at all costs and, therefore, swing at balls that baseball players would let go. Americans, therefore, who hear the word googly at a business meeting can translate it into a curve ball.
'In the bleachers'
Lock has lived in Germany and Japan in addition to his native U.K. During the 1990s, he was CEO of Triumph Motorcycles USA in Atlanta, so he spent enough time watching the Braves to become baseball literate. That helped him to understand what it meant when Triumph sales agents who worked in remote parts of the USA were said to be "in the bleachers," terminology Europeans don't comprehend, he says.
Similarly, few Americans understand that an "own goal" is kicking or deflecting the ball into your own net in soccer and is commonly used in European business for messing up due to no fault but your own, Lock says. Latin American business discussions can include the phrase "parar la pelota," or "to stop the ball," which means to pause and assess before deciding the next move, says Argentina native Juan Carlos Dalto, CEO of yogurt company Dannon.
Roscoe says he has wasted 45 minutes in meetings trying to explain "sticky wicket" and other cricket terms such as "hitting a six" to confused Americans. "They will never get the rules of cricket. You have to be born and bred," Lock says.
How do American executives react when confronted with foreign sports terminology they don't understand? Wright says he learned to pretend he understood when the British tossed around terms like "the pit," which refers to rugby. He says he had 1,500 people working for him who might lose confidence if he seemed confused, "So I figured the best thing to do was to nod and move on."
'All the bases covered'
Johan Eliasch, the Dutch CEO of Amsterdam-based ski-maker Head, says sports jargon is universal to business because both feed on competition. But Roman Stanek, founder of Web services company Systinet, who was raised in the Czech Republic, says he searched the local Czech Internet sites and talked to friends, yet couldn't come up with an example of Czech sports jargon used in business. Stanek says Czechs enjoy sports such as soccer but never discuss it at the office. He says you're more likely to hear "home run" at a Czech business meeting because of the influence of American movies.
The Japanese would know what "all the bases covered" means in baseball, but they don't seem to be able to translate it into business, Wright says. A lot of baseball is also played in Latin America, and the first season of the Israel Baseball League begins in June.
Baseball hasn't caught on in the U.K., but Mark Lancaster, CEO of British software company SDL International that includes among its customers Hewlett-Packard, Chrysler and Microsoft, says baseball jargon is increasingly understood because of the airing of U.S. TV shows such as Friends and Desperate Housewives.
Vijay Eswaran, a native of Malaysia and CEO of Hong Kong-based conglomerate QI Group that runs everything from hotels to TV stations in 30 countries, says it is a good thing there are baseball movies like The Natural and Field of Dreams or many foreign executives who otherwise speak fluent English would be in "a bit of a sticky wicket."
Tim Gannon, the American founder of Outback Steakhouse, was 40 and had just $37 before building a $2 billion restaurant empire in a few years. He says he felt like he had lived Robert Redford's role in The Natural, an over-the-hill rookie who ended the movie by ripping the leather off a ball with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.
It was "that moment of triumph that you know you have done something great and its memory will be emblazoned in your mind for all time," Gannon says. It wasn't a bit of a sticky wicket or a sticky bit of anything else. It was an old-fashioned American "grand slam."
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